A Path Where No Man Thought: Nuclear Winter and the End of the Arms Race

Carl Sagan · Richard Turco

Jul 2017 · Brilliance Audio · Narrated by JD Jackson

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11 hr 36 min

Unabridged

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About this audiobook

The spread of nuclear weapons to unstable third world countries means that despite the dramatic improvement in US/Soviet relations, we are living in a time of unprecedented danger of nuclear war.

In 1982, Professors Sagan and Turco made known their discovery of the concept "nuclear winter", a widespread cold and dark, resulting in agricultural collapse and world famine, that would be generated in even a "small" nuclear war. It was a landmark discovery that revealed in the starkest terms how vulnerable our civilization is to the long-term environmental effects of nuclear war.

Carl Sagan, Pulitzer prize-winning science writer, and Richard Turco, tell the personal story of their findings, and how, despite the much-heralded thawing of the Cold War, there are dangerous inadequacies in nuclear policy and doctrine that need to be addressed.

Introductory music from the original score for COSMOS: A SpaceTime Odyssey composed by Alan Silvestri, used with permission from Cosmos Studios, Inc. and Chappers Music. All rights reserved. Special thanks to Fuzzy Planets, Inc.

The spread of nuclear weapons to unstable third world countries means that despite the dramatic improvement in US/Soviet relations, we are living in a time of unprecedented danger of nuclear war. In 1982, Professors Sagan and Turco made known their discovery of the concept "nuclear winter", a wid...

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About the author

A respected planetary scientist best known outside the field for his popularizations of astronomy, Carl Sagan was born in New York City on November 9, 1934. He attended the University of Chicago, where he received a B.A. in 1954, a B.S. in 1955, and a M.S. in 1956 in physics as well as a Ph.D. in 1960 in astronomy and astrophysics. He has several early scholarly achievements including the experimental demonstration of the synthesis of the energy-carrying molecule ATP (adenosine triphosphate) in primitive-earth experiments. Another was the proposal that the greenhouse effect explained the high temperature of the surface of Venus. He was also one of the driving forces behind the mission of the U.S. satellite Viking to the surface of Mars. He was part of a team that investigated the effects of nuclear war on the earth's climate - the "nuclear winter" scenario. Sagan's role in developing the "Cosmos" series, one of the most successful series of any kind to be broadcast on the Public Broadcasting System, and his book The Dragons of Eden (1977) won the Pulitzer Prize in 1978. He also wrote the novel Contact, which was made into a movie starring Jodie Foster. He died from pneumonia on December 20, 1996. Richard P. Turco is Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Director of UCLA's Institute of the Environment.

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